DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An armed guard at a bank in northern Iran calmly walked up behind a senior Shiite cleric and shot and killed the ayatollah on Wednesday, according to surveillance footage from the site, the most senior clergyman ever killed. during the month of turmoil that rocked the Islamic Republic.
The killing of Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani shocked both the eyewitnesses who witnessed the shooting and the wider public. The cleric served on the country’s Assembly of Experts that selects and oversees the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. It comes after mass protests and a bloody security force crackdown on demonstrators following the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested by the country’s morality police..
Authorities offered no immediate motive for the attack in Babolsar in Iran’s Mazandaran province, just north of the capital, Tehran. At first, state television depicted a man overpowering a guard and shooting the cleric.
But surveillance footage widely shared by Iranian media later showed the shooter inside the bank, apparently armed with a gun and circling moments before approaching Soleimani and shooting him.
When the shot rang out, Soleimani’s white turban fell to the floor as he fainted. A window was broken behind the cleric. Two men, one of them wearing a green uniform, could be seen staring, seemingly stunned. They later grab the man before the footage ends.
The Interior Ministry announced that it would launch a special investigation into the murder.
Soleimani, believed to be 77, served on the Assembly of Experts, an 88-seat panel that oversees the position of Iran’s supreme leader. He also once served as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s personal representative in Iran’s restive southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan..
Shiite clerics have long played an important role in Iran, one that only grew stronger after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Discontent has risen in recent years, however, especially amid waves of nationwide protests over economic, political and civil rights issues in Iran. The country is struggling with the collapse of the country’s currency, the rial, and uncertainty over its relationship with the wider world after the collapse of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers..
Some have criticized the subsidies granted to clerics, although fewer than 10% of Iran’s 200,000 clerics hold official government positions and many seminary students work as laborers or taxi drivers. to stay together.
In the latest unrest in Iran, protesters have also targeted clerics, with several online videos showing young protesters running behind clerics in the street and removing their turbans, a sign of their status.
Students at the seminary were among those killed while serving in the Basij volunteer force of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard during the demonstrations, the government said.
However, Soleimani is the most senior cleric to be killed in recent years. In April 2022, an Uzbek national stabbed two clerics to death in Mashhad at the Imam Reza shrine.
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Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.
